Recently, at a pub with a bunch of my friends who were gen X parents, the talk turned to young love. Most of their kids were in their late teens and early 20s, and embarking on their first relationships.<\/p>\n
These gen X parents were a cohort that supported marriage equality and trans rights, not just for society more broadly but for their own children. And we all prided ourselves on being more progressive than the previous generation. Love is love.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know you are all very accepting of your children\u2019s choices,\u201d I said to the group. \u201cBut what if your child came home from university and said they had fallen in love with an AI?\u201d<\/p>\n
A what?<\/p>\n
\u201cA chatbot. An AI \u2026 a piece of code. These days, it\u2019s a real possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was stunned silence, a kind of wordless \u201coh fuck\u201d. The parents at the table looked freaked out.<\/p>\n
A recent survey found 28%<\/a> of Americans have had an intimate\/romantic AI relationship, while another study showed 19%<\/a> of adults have chatted with an AI romantic partner. And Irish research found 13% of men and 7% of women, with 16% of 25-34 year olds, have pursued romance with AI chatbots.<\/p>\n I sketched it out for my friends. \u201cYour kids come home and say, \u2018Mum, Dad, I\u2019m in a relationship and it\u2019s serious. I think I\u2019m in love. We want to get engaged.\u2019 You get all excited, wanting to meet this person, and then they show you their phone and it looks like a real person, a cutie called Cal, who sounds like a real person when you chat except with one of those strange international accents \u2013 until your kid tells you that since they paid for ChatGPT premium, they now have someone they can talk to all day \u2013 no limits on the interactions and so this bot, Cal, is with them all the time and they never have to be alone, and they\u2019ve never been this happy.\u201d<\/p>\n My friends looked at each other and their liberal instincts took over. \u201cWe would try to accept and understand the relationship\u201d was the general, tentative tenor of the response. I didn\u2019t really believe them. No one at the table looked like they would welcome such an in-law.<\/p>\n For a generation of parents who pride themselves on fewer taboos when it comes to sexuality, a new taboo has emerged<\/p>\n For a generation of parents who pride themselves on fewer taboos when it comes to sexuality, a new taboo has emerged.<\/p>\n That is, you, or one of your kids, or your partner, or your friends, could now feasibly start a serious relationship with a chatbot.<\/p>\n Ask yourself \u2013 what feelings does this invoke? Shame? Confusion? Worry? Fear? Or would you accept the relationship, incorporate it somehow into your family structure, be there with your child to witness their pains and pleasures of falling in love? Accept and respect it, treating the operating system like a significant other?<\/p>\n If it was your friend, would you inquire as to your friend\u2019s bot in the way you would about a flesh partner?<\/p>\n Or would you go into denial and hope it all just goes away, that the code gets a glitch, that it\u2019s a phase, that finally some regulations come in and inter-intelligence relationships are banned? Or like in Ian McEwan\u2019s futurist new novel, What we Can Know, AI becomes operated by the state. \u201cTo prevent over-dependence, they (students) must sit before an approved desktop. They also need to wait five days before they get their next shot,\u201d writes McEwan of the guardrails of this machine that the children crave and worship.<\/p>\n **<\/p>\n While everyone is worried, and rightly so, that AI will take their jobs \u2013 no one seems to be that worried that AI will steal our hearts.<\/p>\n This complacence relies in part on a lack of imagination about what humans really need (attention, care, devotion, companionship) and what machines are increasingly capable of giving (all of the above, without asking for anything in return).<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s possible that there\u2019s a shift afoot. That a relationship with AI is becoming seen as a viable option and there should be no shame around it.\u2019 Photograph: Malte Mueller\/Getty Images\/fStop<\/p>\n And it also assumes the continuance of shame around relationships with AI. That is, no one \u201cnormal\u201d would fall in love with a non-sentient being. It\u2019s just for the maladaptives, who, if it wasn\u2019t AI, would fall in love with a pot plant or a pop-star they\u2019ll never meet, or a character in Harry Potter.<\/p>\n